


Crawl Beneath the Skin

by agdhani



Category: Constantine (TV), Hemlock Grove, Outsiders
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-15
Updated: 2016-02-14
Packaged: 2018-05-20 15:15:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6013570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agdhani/pseuds/agdhani
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When paths cross and worlds collide, it is impossible to keep destiny from crawling beneath the skin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crawl Beneath the Skin

**Author's Note:**

> These three have been begging me for a crossover since Outsiders began...so I'm giving in and seeing where they take me. There's no warnings needed for this installment, but I can't predict what the future might hold...

From the rocky, forested hilltop on the outskirts of Atlanta, the city looked alive, its lights winking and sparkling in the blackness, giving it a brilliance it would lose again with the rising harshness of daybreak. Nighttime was the only time he could stomach the city now, the only time he did not see the filth, the clutter, the crowded turmoil of people trying to force some meaning into their hurried lives. The only time he felt peace. That peace, however had slowly eroded down to the skeleton of wishes and loneliness and longing that denied him the calm he had once thought he would find far away from the isolated realm of Shay Mountain. Yes there was knowledge to be had in this world, women and drugs and beauty, noise and excitement that constituted the chaos of modernity. But those were things that no longer fulfilled him as he had once believed they might. Their siren lure had grown tarnished with time and with the breaking of his heart.

He wanted only to go home again…but home would not have him. There was no going back, they had said. No reason, no bond of blood or history, that would welcome him.

And after what he had seen? What the world down off that mountain had showed him. Beneath he corners of the world beneath a lifted veil of ‘reality’ were things, shadows and flame, that no amount of learning could have prepared him for. Dark things that not even the modern world could see. The fragments of childhood nightmares, the demons that had pulled him away from the mountain in search of something, anything, to take them away, could no longer be hidden away from sight, or banished back into the recesses from whence they had come. He could not take those monsters back to the mountain. It was better if his people never knew of such things.

It was those things that no longer allowed him peace. Those things and the hole in his heart, in his soul, that could no longer be filled. Betrayed, he had left behind the only hope that could fill that thin, shell-like layer, bound, he had hoped, for the comforts and familiar ways and rules of home. The closer he had gotten to home, however, the further away from it he had felt, until tonight...

Tonight, in the last of a string of bars where he had drank up the last penny he had earned, he had given up.

He could not run any longer. He was tired. Lonely. Lost. Desperate. Broken. That which had crawled beneath his skin had burrowed there and was never coming out. The only things that felt real tonight were the emptiness within him and the weight of the gun in his hand. He did not even remember now where he had gotten it. Nothing would ever change for him. There was no going back. Nowhere to go forward to. There was only here. Now. And an end to both.

Slowly his hand came up, the weight heavy enough to drag it back down, but his determination was greater. The cold metallic taste of the barrel between his clenched teeth was barely felt, barely acknowledged. His eyes burned as the distant city stars blurred through salty tears, eyes he turned instead towards the stars above him.

A much better, a more fitting sight to be his last.

And then there was a sound, the rustle of small steps upon dry leaves and twigs that cut through the stillness and spread a muffling blanket over the distant din of engines and sirens. It was enough to give him pause, to draw his head around towards the whispering sound…

Enough to stay his finger upon the trigger.

He hadn’t thought there could be wolves in these parts, not so close to the city at least. Three of them, majestic…wild…full of life in spite of their stillness. Two were black and silver, their yellow eyes intent but not threatening, as if they had never seen a man before, or, perhaps, he wondered with a chill of defeat, they were waiting for him to finish what he had started. The third, point and center, appeared a ghost in the moonlight, the irises of his eyes swirling with liquid gold and a fire that made Asa’s hand begin to tremble.

The white wolf, in a humanlike fashion of empathy and confusion, sat upon its haunches and tilted its head to one side, perplexed, perhaps by the human’s moment of impending self-destruction. It whined with a sadness, a begging, that pierced the man’s soul and dripped its spark of hope upon his bruised and tortured heart.

Slowly, with little thought given to the act, Asa lowered the gun. The hammer clicked back into place, the threat alleviated. Man and wolf stared at one another for several drawn out moments, a silent sharing of things never put into words before the wolf stood, shook out its fur, and retreated into the trees without turning its back upon the life he had just spared.

Asa told himself later, after the wolf and its companions had disappeared into the hillside forest, that the act of lowering the gun had been intended only so that he could fire at the beast’s head should it decide to lunge at him. There was no conscious changing of his mind, no conscious choice made to live. It had nothing to do with an immediate self of self-preservation and the desire to survive. It had nothing to do with an abrupt setting in of amnesia, of forgetting why, as he stared into the wolf’s molten gold eyes, he had wanted to give up his life to begin with. 

Tears flowing freely as the dam of frustration burst in relief, Asa threw back his head and screamed. He was alone upon the hillside, but he no longer felt alone, for minutes later, when the night was silent again, save for the tolling of the midnight church bell far across town,, deep within the forest, a lone wolf howled. And Asa Farrell felt better for having shed the civilized and given in to the primal for the first time in far too long. The unravelling of darkness had begun.

***

The millhouse, its shelves lined with arcane books and dusty artifacts, looked as if some sort of natural disaster had ripped through the living space, empty liquor bottles tipped upon their sides, cigarette butts crushed or left to stain the surfaces with smudges of charred soot, and an array of Chinese takeout containers dropped where they had been finished with no thought given to the chaos of the act or that someone was going to have to clean up after the fact. Upon the age-beaten sofa, sprawled with one arm over the back, another hanging towards the floor, bare legs splayed into a position that should not have been comfortable, the victim of the self-pitying assault snorted and wheezed in his drunken haze, the sound eventually giving way to a choking cough that jolted him upright into sudden wakeful coherency.

It also set his head to pounding so that he grabbed it between his hands and bent forward with a groan of agony.

“Bloody hell…somebody knock me out now…” But the words, coming through a thick haze that made his own voice sound as if it was being filtered by the thick stone walls, brought with them the realization that he was alone. Alone was how he should be, alone was always better.

But alone wasn’t what he wanted.

It had been a mercy killing really, the breaking of the bones of a relationship that had held the potential of being everything he wanted it to be…and more. People who got too close to him, who overstayed their passage through his life to become welcome fixtures in it, inevitably died. It was the nature of his calling, to avert one apocalypse after another alone. He had a knack for surviving, but somehow, that survival rarely extended to those in his orbit and though normally John Constantine was one selfish, arrogant bastard, he did not like to see those he cared about die.

It was easier to disallow himself to care. Quick flings with bar pickups appeased some of the physical needs, and booze and cigarettes appeased the rest.

Sometimes, however, despite his best efforts, caring happened. And when it did, the victims of that caring always left him, always through John’s own failings. Or through his successes. It really depended on how one looked upon the things he did with his life, the choices he was forced to make in the defense of a world that had no pity for a tosser like him.

Knowing those individuals left alive however, and stayed that way, was infinitely easier on his conscience than watching them die because of the choices he made.

Saying goodbye was always one of the bloody hardest things to do. So why, he thought bitterly as he pulled off his tie with one hand, unbuttoned the top of his button-down shirt with the other, and then reached for the nearest not yet empty whiskey bottle, was this time any different?. Why did this time hurt so much worse than he could ever remember a goodbye hurting before?

Because he’d let those blue eyes get beneath his skin. Because he hadn’t had enough to drink yet, he decided. Drinking, and the inevitable daylong hangover, would cure the emotional ache that threatened to kidnap his heart and hold his life captive. He would rather accept this pain upon himself than force an entirely different suffering on that too naïve soul. Anything resembling a return to normal work was going to have to wait until then. Hopefully by then, John would have forgotten the pain.

But he was never, he knew, going to forget that face.

***

Leaving the others behind, the white wolf ran alone, following an instinct that drew it further away from civilization, further away from that unexpected, perplexing encounter earlier that evening. He was surprised the other wolves had not remained with him, and he marginally worried that they would double back upon that defenseless man, but he trusted that their view of him as Alpha, and the fact that they had eaten well earlier that night, would mean that they would feel no compulsion to kill for sport.

That was something only his kind was capable of, he thought grimly. Here, in the wild, the wolves hunted only what they needed. He was no such creature. His history had proven that.

It had not been the scent of prey that had lured him, but rather something intoxicating in its newness, in its humanity, in the lost desperation that he himself had felt not so long ago…and yet felt to have been a lifetime ago. The wolf should not have cared for such things; he had given up caring about others the day Roman had ripped away the last of his humanity by forcing him into an act he had never imagined being capable of.

Damn that Upir…why did he have to do those things? Why did he have to leave Peter with no other choice but to destroy the forbidden love affair that his life had become?

With no one left to ground him, no reason to go on living, the choice to set adrift had been an easy one to make. Little by little, in the bleak months that followed, the memories of that time, those thoughts, those places and names and faces he had loved, the last tendrils of what had made him a man, were bled away into the instincts of the wolf. Leeching away until soon, he was vaguely aware, all that would remain was the wolf. Peter Rumancek would be gone.

It was the risk he had known and accepted that last night. A choice he had been given but that had been no real choice at all. It was precisely what Peter had hoped for, the losing of himself, the forgetting. The closure written in the taste of blood.

Until tonight. Until another’s path of impending self-destruction had made him think twice about his own. He did not know that stranger, did not know what had led him to the belief that exit was the only torturous choice he had. He did not know why he should care.

What he did realize, as he had stared into the stranger’s teary face, was that blowing his brains all over the mountainside was no different than allowing the wolf to devour his own humanity. No different at all. Peter did not want to see the fate of un-becoming befall such a man, and, for the first time, he realized that he did not want to be lost into a void of non-existence either. He was still Peter Rumancek, Romani…man.

But not, he suspected, for much longer.

And so he had done this one last good deed with what remained of the human he had been. He had willed the stranger to lower the gun, had willed him to live, had given him as much of his own strength as he could in that sharing of gazes. Once more he had saved lives, or at least a single life, and he clung to that knowledge as the trees flew past and the hot night air rippled across his fur like waves in an ever-tumbling eternal river.

If whatever gods existed, if the ancestors he had tried to honor throughout his life, could see that final, desperate attempt to cling to humanity, surely they would see fit to give that humanity back to him. Surely he would not be trapped forever beneath the skin, the mind, of the wolf. Surely, he thought, as he reached the mountain’s peak, threw his head back, and howled, he was good enough for that.

He had to be. Else he was nothing at all. Nothing but the wolf.


End file.
